An evening of ethnographic and experimental screenings and conversations, taking the debated buzzword/theory as a starting point to provoke discussion around entangled relationships with climate and environment.

Programmed by Arti Siudem, Sam McNeil and Emelie Victoria

To start off the year and work towards our 2026 edition of KONTEKST Film Festival, we invited you to a community film screening showcasing works by emerging visual anthropologists and filmmakers whose works explore relationships between humans and more-than-human actors.

RESOURCES READINGS SOURCES

RESOURCES READINGS SOURCES

RESOURCES GATHERED

In programming and hosting this event, we came were in conversation with many resources that we want to pay tribute to and share more widely. Some of these were for example mentioned in the panel. We hope they might be valuable to you too!

RESEARCH OR CONCEPTS WE MENTIONED
We mentioned some research during our talk that we are linking here.

• A research project in Canada that did tests on sediments from a lake to determine when Anthropocene as an epoch should start, and suggested the 1950s as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (a “golden spike”) to define the start of the Anthropocene, as this sediment was marked by radionuclides from nuclear tests and other anthropogenic indicators.

• New materialism - a theoretical approach that argues matter (bodies, objects, environments, technologies) is not passive or inert but actively shapes reality, meaning, and power alongside humans.

• Transcorporeality - The idea that human bodies are inseparably entangled with the material world—air, water, chemicals, microbes, and ecosystems constantly flow through us—so there is no clear boundary between “the body” and “the environment.”
  

AUTHORS TO ENGAGE WITH AND LEARN FROM
We have chosen to link to one example of their work, and tried to focus not only on academic texts but also on more approachable outputs like interviews and videos, but they all have a lot more on offer.

• Anna Lowenhaubt Tsing; anthropocene understood not just over time but in terms of the “patchy” spatial structures and histories of landscapes shaped by multispecies relations

• Kathryn Yusoff; “A billion Anthropocenes or none” - geology not as a neutral science of rocks and ages but a “discipline of extractive and originary science”

• Ursula K Le Guin; anthropocene and the art of living on a damaged planet

• Arianne Conty; positions human-nature split is an illusion and propose to replace Western dualism with a new way of thinking that treats all things as connected and alive

• Nandita Biswas Mellamphy; what it means in practice to de-centre the human or think “post-human”

• Marisol De La Cadena; offers a decolonial proposal for “multispecies”, as an emergence through a world on many worlds

• Sam Adelman; goes over some alternative terms and history of the term anthropocene itself

• Malcom Ferdinand; ongoing political actions and art practices that attempt to open up avenues for a decolonial ecology

• Antônio Bispo dos Santos; quilombola decolonial resistance, writes here on turning the weapons of the coloniser against them to protect the ways of life of subaltern community

• Sylvia Winter; on occupying the human as a category
  

  
  FILMS TO WATCH OR ART TO SEE
  We think these add to the discussion too.

• Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman, 2021)

• Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)

• Edward Burtynsky’s Photographs
  
  

AS MANY OF THE AUTHORS ABOVE DISCUSS - AND AS EXPANDED ON IN OUR TALK - TERMS LIKE ANTHROPOCENE CAN BE MESSY AND SOMETIMES PROBLEMATIC, BUT WE ALSO WANTED TO SHARE A BRIEF SUMMARY AND UNDERSTANDING OF SOME ALTERNATIVE TERMS TO ANTHROPOCENE THAT WE HAVE COME ACROSS

Plantationocene (Donna Haraway in conversation w Anna Tsing etc)
Argues the cause to this time-epoch is planetary transformations produced by plantation systems, rather than by “humanity” in general. It emphasises how racial slavery, forced labor, monoculture agriculture, land dispossession, and extractive economies reorganized both human and nonhuman life.

Capitalocene (Jason Moore / Andreas Malm);
Shifts the focus from “humanity” in general to capitalism as a historical system that organises extraction, labor, and nature. Argues that planetary crisis is driven by capital accumulation, not humans per se. This term is contested and Moore and Malm have slightly different standpoints.

Chthulucene (Donna Haraway)
A speculative alternative that rejects epoch naming based on domination, apocalypse, or human exceptionalism. Instead of defining an era by destruction, it emphasises entanglement, multispecies interdependence, and ongoing survival. Comes from greek chthonic, meaning of the earth, soil, or underworld.

Eurocene (Alf Hornborg & Andreas Malm)
Argues from political ecology and Marxist geography that European colonialism and industrialisation, not humanity as a whole, initiated planetary ecological transformation. The US for example becomes an extension of this.

FUNDRAISER INFO: The funds we raised through through ticket sales will be used: 85% to cover for the annual fees of hosting our website and 15% donated to the fundraiser pot for the Al-Jawad camp. (Update on amounts coming soon!) 

FILMS SCREENED:

1. L'Ombra di Rasputin (27min) by Pietro Francesco Pingitore

A hunter, a veterinarian and a nurse conversing around a surgical table while performing surgery on a wild boar. Different visions of care juxtapose in one ecology where nature is manufactured, harvested and exploited by human capital. In this frame the wild boar Rasputin is held captive in between imperatives of ecological human regulations; Whereas the nature/culture divide is enacted, wilderness is the shadow of human architectures. This sensorial exploration looks at conservation behaviours as infrastructures shielding domestic spheres from wildlife in the plains surrounding Piacenza. Landscapes are framed in conversations with humans, other-than-human actants and technologies of control.
Content warning: animal harm, body organs.

Pietro Francisco Pingitore (he/him) is a visual anthropologist from Milan, Italy who uses filmmaking to explore lines traced by the separations between nature and culture, domestic and wild, art and science, behaviour and performance, documentary and fiction.

2. Disjointed (11min) by Clara Helbig

Two men share their experiences of working in the food industrial complex, challenging our traditional ideas of food production. Dealing with a patriarchal paradigm in crisis, disjointed offers a performative space to heal from trauma: work movements become a way of embodying the inaccessible.
Content warning: animal harm, gore-like visuals, mentions of violence and suicide.

Clara Helbig (she/her) is a filmmaker whose work explores human, animal, and landscape entanglements.

3. Letters to a Forest (23min) by Emelie Victoria

A collective poetic essay film where diverse voices reach out from and to Swedish forest landscapes with reflections on belonging, power, value and change. Throughout the film, we are accompanied by field-recordings from the forest, as well as glimpses of sounds formed by translating electronic vibrations from various species in the landscape the film takes place in; recorded by the sound artist Simon Lerin. The image’s grain and movement invite the viewer to pay attention to the subjectivity of the filmmaker and the collaboration required to make the film.

Emelie Victoria (she/they) is a is a Swedish/Norwegian multimedia researcher and artist whose work often makes use of methodologies inspired by forms of correspondence, and a focus on relationships and collage to address questions that centre around climate justice, imaginaries, queer ecology and belonging.

4. Hunt for the Malwoden (19min) by Lily Angelone

What does it mean to make kin with beings we are taught to revile? Hunt for the Malwoden is a meditation on kinship, disgust, and the porous boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds

Lily Angelone (she/her) is a visual anthropologist curious about the porous boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.

PANEL:

The screening of four short films was followed by a panel where the filmmakers, alongside researchers, attempted to untangle questions of power, translation and ethics that erupt while from working within this theme. In the panel, we took off from the concept of ‘Anthropocene’ to discuss how human relationships with, and impact on non-human actors are researched, framed and explored; and how dominant political narratives continue to enforce the separation of nature/culture. On the panel was:

1. Elisabed Gedevanishvili (they/them) - a multi-disciplinary researcher working on climate change, the environment, and prefigurative politics in the South Caucasus.

2. Lily Angelone (she/her) - author of the film “Hunt for the Malwoden”.

3. Clara Helbig (she/her) - author of the film “Disjointed”.

We curated the evening with hope that the selection of works and conversation prompts will result in a thought-provoking discussion with the audience which can guide us us in programming other events throughout this year.

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION: The venue is wheelchair accessible and all the films we will play will include closed captions in English. Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, we are currently unable to hire a sign language interpreter for the panel.